Individualism & Morality

Morality, as a social good, helps people cooperate and accumulate collective capital (everyone rises together). Individualism is not compatible with social morality. Most humans aren’t religious enough to fear God, and morality isn’t individually advantageous enough to incentivize an ambitious person to follow it. The most desirable scenario for an ambitious greedy person is to live immorally within a moral society. This is why sociopaths are often so successful, they’re parasites who feed better on healthier hosts. The only concern for the parasite is how vigilant and proactive their host’s immune system is, and when religion withers there’s little immunity against individual deviants.

The state of Western sexual morality is among the best examples of this. The person who chooses to act morally and save their virginity for marriage is functionally deciding to damage themselves (from a secular social perspective). Their choice to remain a virgin will destroy them in at least three ways: (1) it will build a wall of resentment between them and their peers/society, (2) it will severely limit their romantic options if they seek someone who shares their commitments, and (3) if they end up marrying a non-virgin it will create an imbalance of jealousy and psychological leverage in the relationship that will negatively affect them.

Faced with this reality, only a person with semi-self-destructive tendencies would actively pursue the path of waiting until marriage. Other motivations might include deep faith or being lied to: “If you wait until marriage I promise God will give you a mate who waited for you.” The latter possibility was the most common among millennial evangelicals who never considered that God told Hosea to marry a prostitute.

By the time the situation has devolved to its present point (2018), the split between religion and society is already so advanced that a person’s choice to devoutly follow a religion might begin destabilizing society by delegitimizing it and presenting a counter-worldview. The social purpose of morality has now been lost. Morality has become another wedge producing and exacerbating division and social conflict. Morality has become an act of deviant rebellion against society. It’s become “morality against society.” In the final stages of civilizational decay, the relationship between individualism and morality becomes inverted, and the individual becomes the only entity capable of sustaining morality. Individualism destroys healthy societies, but in the end it’s the last force standing against moral darkness.

Modern Christian theologians have made much of the contrast between the Old and New Testament’s moral focus. The Old Testament seems to focus on collective ethnic moral revival (Israel/Edom/Egypt/Nineveh must return to God). The New Testament, however, seems to focus on individual morality, and congregational morality appears to be the highest possible collective. Anti-nationalist Christians claim this represents a shift in covenantal legitimacy away from the ethno-state and towards personal individual salvation. However, the New Testament shift is really about adapting to the conditions produced by the cosmopolitan decay of traditional social structures underway in the first century Roman Empire. Various Jewish movements of the time attempted to LARP the ancient Israelite holy state back into existence, but they all failed and were destroyed in AD 70.

The first century Christian communities eventually gave rise to new civilizations centered in the Gothic and Slavic North. However, it remains unclear whether our present atomized moral rebels will be able to form communities capable of rebuilding a non-individualist moral society for the future. We must have faith in God, hope for the future, and love for our people. Our theoretical future will not arise because we willed it into existence, but because God acted “miraculously” to secure it.